The Greater Thing

Начало книги

The thing in the dead city was conceived the night the city died. It was created by chance, but unlike that first life on Earth, it was not mothered by the calm earth and water and fathered by the young sun. Its mother was the blasted, riven soil and the screaming winds of concussion, and its father was the fierce radiation of the shattered atomic pile.

It began somewhere under the ruins as a single-celled speck of protoplasm; insensate and without purpose, hardly more than a chemical change. But there was a difference—it grew. It grew, and the radiations hastened its evolution, contracting millennia into days. As it grew it changed form in parts. Parts of it died, unsuited for survival, while the remainder grew stronger and more complex. It acquired the first beginnings of intelligence, and its intelligence became greater as its body became more complex. It developed extensions that crept along the subterranean ruins then explored upward into the sunlight. It expanded, its blobs and webs reaching outward; constantly evolving until it could change form at will, and parts of it could separate from the whole for a while, then merge again with it.

Читать дальше →